Someone said life assurance is far more valuable and important than life insurance. I read that not long before Marghanita Laski died in 1988 – a well-known secular humanist and novelist – she said, “What I envy most about you Christians is your forgiveness; I have nobody to forgive me.”

God designed man to have a need to relieve the guilt he has in life. Guilt is a spiritual issue, not a psychological issue. We try to cope and explain away the mechanism of guilt, while continuing to struggle with it. We seek all sorts of ways to conceal, to release, to endure the pangs and feelings of guilt that is unresolved in our souls.

This reminded me of Val Patterson who died on July 12, 2012, due to cancer. He knew the end was coming, so he chose to write his own obituary notice. Through media outlets, this obituary went viral.

In this account he said, “Now that I have gone to my reward, I have confessions and things I should now say. As it turns out, I am the guy who stole the safe from the Motor View Drive Inn back in June 1971. I could have left that unsaid, but I wanted to get it off my chest.”

Forty-one years earlier as a teen, he had committed a robbery.

Though the police did not catch him, he was never able to escape the voice of a guilty conscience. Just as many today seek to hide or remove this voice, it keeps coming back to cause us pain and remorse.

King David said in Psalm 32:1-2 (HCSB): “How joyful is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered! How joyful is the man the Lord does not charge with sin and in whose spirit is no deceit!” Jesus Christ came into this world to offer us forgiveness for our sins, and to remove them completely from us (Psalm 103:12).

It will be no small comfort when we come to the end of our journey to know that our sins are forgiven, and that they are not screaming at us in the corridors of our mind as we pass from this world to the next.

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Since 1833 the Biblical Recorder has served North Carolina Baptists as the Baptist State Convention's official news journal - with the emphasis on news. The paper was founded by Thomas Meredith, an early pastor, writer and denominational statesman in North Carolina.